The village of Starčevo, the type site, is located on the north bank of the Danube in Serbia (Vojvodina province), opposite Belgrade. It represents the earliest settled farming society in the area, although hunting and gathering still provided a significant portion of the inhabitants’ diet.

In human remains of Starčevo culture in four investigated samples (Lipson et al., 2017) were found three different Y haplogroups: H2, G2a2a1 and G2a2b2b1a. Also there were found four different mtDNA lineages: T1a, N1a1a1, K1a4 and W5. All male and female lineages correspond to those that were found in European Neolithic farmers. (…)

Neolithic Europe: it’s complicated (Lipson et al. 2017 preprint)

The dam is breaking. Just in at bioRxiv:

Abstract: Ancient DNA studies have established that European Neolithic populations were descended from Anatolian migrants who received a limited amount of admixture from resident hunter-gatherers. Many open questions remain, however, about the spatial and temporal dynamics of population interactions and admixture during the Neolithic period. Using the highest-resolution genome-wide ancient DNA data set assembled to date—a total of 177 samples, 127 newly reported here, from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic of Hungary (6000-2900 BCE, n = 98), Germany (5500-3000 BCE, n = 42), and Spain (5500-2200 BCE, n = 37)—we investigate the population dynamics of Neolithization across Europe. We find that genetic diversity was shaped predominantly by local processes, with varied sources and proportions of hunter-gatherer ancestry among the three regions and through time. Admixture between groups with different ancestry profiles was pervasive and resulted in observable population transformation across almost all cultural transitions. Our results shed new light on the ways that gene flow reshaped European populations throughout the Neolithic period and demonstrate the potential of time-series-based sampling and modeling approaches to elucidate multiple dimensions of historical population interactions.

Update 08/03/2017: In fact, there’s nothing overly complicated in this manuscript. The table below says it all: Neolithic farmers across space and time in most of Europe were very closely related, and only differed in their levels of Western Hunter-Gatherer (HG) admixture. Admittedly, things would look a lot simpler if not for that somewhat unexpected R, R1 and R1b1 in Middle Neolithic Germany, but this doesn’t appear to be a game changer, and is not flagged as such in the preprint.

The Getes big-bang theory

Byzantine Creation Era ”The Making of the World”- Facerea Lumii – 5600 BC – the breaking of the Bosphorus, the Fresh Water Lake becomes the Salt Water Black Sea.
The Proto Getes living around the banks of Black Sea migrate outwards. ProtoGetes going up the Danube to Western Europe became ProtoCelts and ProtoGetes going east became Massagetae / IndoAryans – vedic & iranian cultures. Present day Romania is the turntable, the intersection of all indo-european branches!!

R1b origin is SE of Caspian sea. R1b goes round S of Caspian Sea than to the N of Black Sea. Here we have the SECOND BIG BANG – The southern Steppe R1b culture culture mixed with northern forest-steppe R1a culture AND Old Europe I2+J1/E1/G Cucuteni farming culture!! This mixture produced the Arian Getes.

But the center of gravity in my opinion is not the N of the Black Sea – it is the Cucuteni/Vinca/Hamangia area, ie Old Europe around present day Romania, which is the area with BIGGEST population. I2 is the basic layer which absorbed first the J1/E1/G neolithic farmers that came from Middle Asia producing the Old Europe civilization. This is the FIRST BIG BANG, based on FARMING the first mixture that produced a stronger culture, better technologies, better living conditions, population growth!! The farming, the east shores of the Black Sea and the lower Danube basin produced the biggest population growth &concentration whichlater started to expand, to Western Europe – the ProCelts and than through the Aryan migrations, to the Pontic Caspian steppes and down to the vedic and iranian cultures (…)

Matt said…
At the moment, it seems in ancient dna the solid deep link of R to ANE is MA-1 having R (basal to R1 / R2 or sidebranch), and then, in extremely simplified terms, so far you have WHG related cultures (EHG and WHG proper) usually in Eastern Europe, having the R1 descending clades, possibly from this ANE source, and Iran_Neolithic, which is highly diverged from WHG but seems to have some link to ANE, having R2.
March 7, 2017 at 3:02 PM

UWAGA!!! BARDZO CIEKAWE DOTYCZĄCE ZMIAN KLIMATU

batman said…
Please note that the climatical fluctations at the end of ice-time (23.000 – 12.000 yrs BP) strongly decimated all the largers species that existed during the Eurasian paleolithic.

At the very end of this extreme fluctations – during the Younger Dryas – the continent went through a „Megafaunal Mass-extinction Event” – where 2/3 of the mamalian species of Europe and northern Eurasia (above the 40th parallel) – such as giant deer, elk and mamoths – went completely EXTINCT.

A similar extinction is also recorded in the North Americas, during the very same millenia; 12.900 – 12.000 yrs BP.

Among the few surviviors were a bunch of humans, who apparently had a biology and a culture very well adapted to the cold and dim environment of ice-age Europe. Besides, among the large animals surviving where species like dogs and ducks, goats and cows, pigs and horses, deers and reindeers, wolves and wolverines, bears and beavers.

Half of them may have needed human assistance to manage the extremes of the YD. Which may explain the extensive use of domesticated animals that evolves as the arctic and semi-arctic climate-zones are re-populated.

Due to the extreme decimation of these species they all went through a generic and gentic bottle-neck during the Younger Dryas. Consequently we have a strong genetic „re-shuffle” (or „re-start”) after the YD.

Checking the genetic maps of Eurasia before and after the LGM (23-18.000 yrs BP) we see a genetic re-shuffle. Then a similar and even stronger re-shuffle takes place with the YD.

Which means that the specific y-dna and mt-dna of the Paleolithic gene-pools were decimated and bottle-necked at least twice. Which again means that MOST of the dna-types and lines from Paleolithic samples are basically extinct – and thus „blindgates” in runs with mesolithic Eurasians and all their present descendants.

Which again begs the question of locating the Caucasian „urheimat”, to explain the mesolithic, neolithic and present distribution of y-dna-lines.

Then we may find the origin of agriculture and the historical stem of the I-E languages to evolve from the same area of origin – as a quintessence of the traditions that made the genetic ancestors of the Caucasians able to survive 40.000 years of ice-time, north of the 55th parallel.
March 7, 2017 at 3:46 PM

„Heavily sex-biased” population dispersals into the Indian Subcontinent

And so it begins. BMC Evolutionary Biology has a very interesting, but hardly surprising, new paper on the population history of the Indian Subcontinent. Emphasis is mine:

Background: India is a patchwork of tribal and non-tribal populations that speak many different languages from various language families. Indo-European, spoken across northern and central India, and also in Pakistan and Bangladesh, has been frequently connected to the so-called “Indo-Aryan invasions” from Central Asia ~3.5 ka and the establishment of the caste system, but the extent of immigration at this time remains extremely controversial. South India, on the other hand, is dominated by Dravidian languages. India displays a high level of endogamy due to its strict social boundaries, and high genetic drift as a result of long-term isolation which, together with a very complex history, makes the genetic study of Indian populations challenging.

Results: We have combined a detailed, high-resolution mitogenome analysis with summaries of autosomal data and Y-chromosome lineages to establish a settlement chronology for the Indian Subcontinent. Maternal lineages document the earliest settlement ~55–65 ka (thousand years ago), and major population shifts in the later Pleistocene that explain previous dating discrepancies and neutrality violation. Whilst current genome-wide analyses conflate all dispersals from Southwest and Central Asia, we were able to tease out from the mitogenome data distinct dispersal episodes dating from between the Last Glacial Maximum to the Bronze Age. Moreover, we found an extremely marked sex bias by comparing the different genetic systems.

Conclusions: Maternal lineages primarily reflect earlier, pre-Holocene processes, and paternal lineages predominantly episodes within the last 10 ka. In particular, genetic influx from Central Asia in the Bronze Age was strongly male-driven, consistent with the patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilineal social structure attributed to the inferred pastoralist early Indo-European society. This was part of a much wider process of Indo-European expansion, with an ultimate source in the Pontic-Caspian region, which carried closely related Y-chromosome lineages, a smaller fraction of autosomal genome-wide variation and an even smaller fraction of mitogenomes across a vast swathe of Eurasia between 5 and 3.5 ka.

…

There are now sufficient high-quality Y-chromosome data available (especially Poznik et al. [58]) to be able to draw clear conclusions about the timing and direction of dispersal of R1a (Fig. 5). The indigenous South Asian subclades are too young to signal Early Neolithic dispersals from Iran, and strongly support Bronze Age incursions from Central Asia. The derived R1a-Z93 and the further derived R1a-Z94 subclades harbour the bulk of Central and South Asian R1a lineages [55, 58], as well as including some Russian and European lineages, and have been variously dated to 5.6 [4.0;7.3] ka [55], 4.5-5.3 ka with expansions ~4.0-4.5 ka [58], or 4.7 [4.0;5.5] ka (Yfull tree v4.10 [54]). The South Asian R1a-L657, dated to ~4.2 ka [3.3;5.1] (Yfull tree v4.10 [54]]), is the largest (in the 1KG dataset) of several closely related subclades within R1a-Z94 of very similar time depth. Moreover, not only has R1a been found in all Sintashta and Sintashta-derived Andronovo and Srubnaya remains analysed to date at the genome-wide level (nine in total) [76, 77], and been previously identified in a majority of Andronovo (2/3) and post-Andronovo Iron Age (Tagar and Tachtyk: 6/6) male samples from southern central Siberia tested using microsatellite analysis [101], it has also been identified in other remains across Europe and Central Asia ranging from the Mesolithic up until the Iron Age (Fig. 5).

The other major member of haplogroup R in South Asia, R2, shows a strikingly different pattern. It also has deep non-Subcontinental branches, nesting a South Asian specific subclade. But the deep lineages are mainly seen in the eastern part of the Near East, rather than Central Asia or eastern Europe, and the Subcontinental specific subclade is older, dating to ~8 ka [55].

Altogether, therefore, the recently refined Y-chromosome tree strongly suggests that R1a is indeed a highly plausible marker for the long-contested Bronze Age spread of Indo-Aryan speakers into South Asia, although dated aDNA evidence will be needed for a precise estimate of its arrival in various parts of the Subcontinent. aDNA will also be needed to test the hypothesis that there were several streams of Indo-Aryan immigration (each with a different pantheon), for example with the earliest arriving ~3.4 ka and those following the Rigveda several centuries later [12]. Although they are closely related, suggesting they likely spread from a single Central Asian source pool, there do seem to be at least three and probably more R1a founder clades within the Subcontinent [58], consistent with multiple waves of arrival. Genomic Y-chromosome phylogeography is in its infancy compared to mito-genome analysis so it is of course likely that the picture will evolve with sequencing of further South Asian Y-chromosomes, but the picture is already sufficiently clear that we do not expect it to change drastically.

Ancient DNA points to the Eurasian steppe as a proximate source for Indo-European migrations into Europe

This is yet another teaser for the upcoming Corded Ware/Yamnaya paper from the Reich lab. Sadly, it doesn’t mention Y-chromosome haplogroups, so perhaps the authors are going to tackle this issue later. However, check out what they say about the German and Spanish farmers being of the same stock, and the resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry in Western Europe after the early Neolithic. Fascinating stuff.

Ancient DNA points to the Eurasian steppe as a proximate source for Indo-European migrations into Europe
David Reich and Nick Patterson

Abstract: We generated genome-wide data from 65 Europeans who lived between 8,000-3,000 years ago by enriching ancient DNA libraries for a target set of about 390,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms. This strategy decreases the sequencing required to obtain genome-wide data from ancient DNA samples by around 1000-fold, allowing us to study an order of magnitude more individuals than previous studies and to obtain new insights about the past. We show that in western Europe, the farmers of both Germany and Spain >7,000 years ago were descended from a common ancestral stock. These farmers did not replace the earlier hunter-gatherers, but continued to mix with them, leading to a resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry in both Germany and Spain ~1,000-2,000 years later. In eastern Europe, the hunter-gatherers of Russia >7,000 years ago were distinct from those of the west, having an increased affinity to a ~24,000 year old individual from Siberia, but this affinity was reduced by ~5,000 years ago in the Yamnaya steppe pastoralists because of admixture with a population of Near Eastern ancestry. Western and Eastern Europe collided ~4,500 years ago with the appearance of the Corded Ware people in Central Europe, who derived at least two thirds of their ancestry from an eastern population closely related to the Yamnaya. The evidence for mass migration into Europe thousands of years after the arrival of agriculture, in combination with linguistic and archaeological data, makes a compelling case for the steppe as a proximate source for the spread of Indo-European languages into Europe.

Maju said…
„These farmers did not replace the earlier hunter-gatherers, but continued to mix with them, leading to a resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry in both Germany and Spain ~1,000-2,000 years later”.

Exactly as I expected. The resurgence must be attributed to Megalithic (and BB) expansion.

„In eastern Europe, the hunter-gatherers of Russia >7,000 years ago were distinct from those of the west, having an increased affinity to a ~24,000 year old individual from Siberia”…

Again exactly as I expected.

„… but this affinity was reduced by ~5,000 years ago in the Yamnaya steppe pastoralists because of admixture with a population of Near Eastern ancestry”.

This is interestingly novel. Is it maybe when the R1a people arrived from Iran/Turkey (as per Underhill)?

Archaeologically speaking, we know little of the exact origins of the PIE or early Kurgan people. Samara has only been dug up to the Neolithic layer, before it is a mystery.

In any case it seems to imply that IE-speaking Kurgan peoples, carriers of ANE into Europe, were also carrying an unknown fraction of both WHG-like and EEF-like genomes (although surely subtly different from those Western references), rendering the analysis even more complicated.

„Corded Ware people in Central Europe (…) derived at least two thirds of their ancestry from an eastern population closely related to the Yamnaya”.

That’s a figure. And a big one indeed! Wonder how Corded compares with their Eastern BB successors, my impression is that they were not fully related, as BB probably gathered rather the pre-IE substrate, even if under IE language and still coalescing identity clues.
January 19, 2015 at 11:30 AM

Maju said…
„It’s very confusing why Yamna genomes from Samara which is pretty far east had so much WHG(maybe our estimations were wrong and they had under 30% WHG), when Asians have so little WHG”.

That’s because both Western and Eastern pre-Neolithic Europeans descended from the same original founder populations, associated to Aurignacian and Gravettian cultures. Soon they diverged, with the Eastern group admixing with paleo-Siberians (different from East Asians and rather akin by origin to Europeans, West Asians and maybe Indians, as well as partly to Native Americans), but they still retained a „European aboriginal” affinity, detected here as WHG.

It’s important to understand that:

Earliest UP or „Aurignacoid” expanded from probably West Asia (Iran?, Uzbekistan?) to Europe, Altai, West Asia and probably much of NE Africa, as well as maybe India as well (not too clear how earliest UP procceded in the southern arch yet).

Already in Europe, Aurignacian expanded from Central Europe in West and East directions c. 41 Ka BP.

Later, also in Europe, a second wave (maybe of West Asian origin) known as Gravettian and associated with the famous „Crô-Magnon” man, spread in the same fashion from Central Europe, reaching as far as Central Siberia (Mal’ta for example belongs to Gravettian culture). This happened after c. 32 Ka BP.

After that, Western and Eastern Europe evolved separately. So the affinity between Eastern and Western paleo-Europeans must be attributed to steps 1, 2 and 3, and shouldn’t be any more recent.
January 19, 2015 at 11:41 AM

Davidski said…
Okay, firstly, I find it very difficult to believe that the Near Eastern farmers who lowered the levels of ANE on the steppe by ~5,000 YBP (but probably appeared there much earlier during the Neolithic) also brought R1a to Eastern Europe.

What I think happened is what we already know happened in Central Europe, which is that is male hunter-gatherers often mated with female farmers. In other words, R1a looks to me like an eastern hunter-gatherer lineage that expanded during the Chalcolithic with a subset of the mixed hunter-gatherer/farmer population from the Russian steppe. It arrived in the Near East with ANE and the Indo-Europeans.

Also, I find it hard to believe that there’s no WHG in Central Asia, considering that this is what the K8 results show, and also that Tajiks have higher affinity to Loschbour than Armenians do (so their WHG affinity can’t be mediated entirely via farmer gene flow from the Near East).

If the Eastern HG were long in Russia, then why do the authors say that there is evidence for „mass migration into Europe”? Why could then EHGs not have just spread from eastern Europe into the West?

„These farmers did not replace the earlier hunter-gatherers, but continued to mix with them, leading to a resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry in both Germany and Spain ~1,000-2,000 years later.”

Surely a resurgence of HGs would have depended on those who did not mix. The claim that Neos did not replace HGs seems false. They took over most of the land.

The authors seem to have a preset agenda of mass migration into Europe and mixing. Maybe they are just PC?
January 19, 2015 at 2:22 PM

Davidski said…When I read the line „mass migration into Europe” in the context of the entire abstract I actually see „mass migration from the Russian steppe deeper into Europe”.

Also, even if the farmers took over most of the land (which doesn’t sound right to me, because only some of the land in Europe at the time was suitable for the early Neolithic farming package), that doesn’t mean pure hunter-gatherers didn’t manage to hang on for over a thousand years on the peripheries of the Neolithic settlements. It’s these people who would have mixed with the farmers very gradually, as both groups became more familiar with each other and less hostile. As a result, hunter-gatherer ancestry would rise among the farmer population, and thus hunter-gatherer ancestry would increase as part of the total ancestry in Europe, because farmers had the demographic advantage.
January 19, 2015 at 2:31 PM

apostateimpressions said…Well, we have a common use of the word Europe and migration from the eastern half of Europe into the western is correctly stated as „migration ACROSS Europe” and not „into Europe”.

To say that HGs survived on the periphery does not mean that farmers did not replace them in much of Europe. The statement that farmers „did not replace” HGs misses all of the replacement that did take place.

And the suggestion that „mixing led to” a resurgence of HGs is crass.

A better statement would have been that „farmers gradually replaced HGs in much of Europe, although some mixing did take place; HGs survived on the peripheries, which led to a resurgence, and some HGs spread from east Europe to the west.”

But no, they are clearly pushing the idea of „mass immigration into Europe and mixing.”

It is plain PC.
January 19, 2015 at 3:00 PM

Chad Rohlfsen said…Yamnaya is modeled as 50% Armenian and 50% Karelian. You can’t get 51% WHG with that. Our model follows the outline of the study. It could be that Yamnaya is 23%ANE, Corded at 16%, and Bell Beaker at 13%. Either way, they have to be close to 40% Near Eastern, as that is about half of what Armenians are.
January 20, 2015 at 5:04 PM

Davidski said…
Kurti, The Karelian genomes are from the Mesolithic, so they probably have 0% Near Eastern admixture. Thus, 50/50 Armenian/Karelian is much less than 50% Near Eastern.
January 20, 2015 at 7:26 PM

Davidski said…Ryan, There’s no evidence at the moment that Near Eastern R1a is ancestral to European R1a.

The last Underhill paper doesn’t provide such evidence, even though the authors think that it does, and many people believe them.

The data in that paper show the presence of a rare form of R1a-M420* in the Near East, which, judging by its haplotypes, is the result of a recent founder effect in the region.

We don’t know when and how that R1a-M420* ended up in the Near East, and what its origins are. But it’s not ancestral to R1a-M417, and thus to European R1a.

Also, like I said, why would a population that lowered the level of ANE on the steppe bring R1a to the steppe? Mal’ta boy, the main ANE proxy, belonged to R* and lived on the steppe.

The Near East is not a plausible source of Y-DNA R for Europe. To me it looks like a sink.

Also, Iberia could not have been a reservoir of ANE, because if it was, then we’d hear about it in this last Reich abstract, because it features samples from Spain.
January 21, 2015 at 3:20 PM

Ryan said…
Davidski – „We don’t know when and how that R1a-M420* ended up in the Near East, and what its origins are. But it’s not ancestral to R1a-M417, and thus to European R1a.”

Fair enough. They’re operating under the assumption that the greatest diversity will be found close to the origin, but the diversity in the Zagros may just be because it is from one of the earliest migrations from the Urheimat, with that diversity subsequently being lost in the steppe due to the various demographic turnovers there.

It really won’t be settled until we get many more ancient DNA samples from the steppe, the Zagros and Siberia that predate the expansion of R1a.

You say you don’t really know where the Near Eastern R1a comes in. The microblades figure from that posts suggests it could also be a parallel migration from Siberia that occurred simultaneous to a migration to the Pontic steppe. Just throwing that out there.

We’re not really talking about the Near East there though so much as we’re talking about the interface between the Caucasus, the Near East and Central Asia.

„Also, like I said, why would a population that lowered the level of ANE on the steppe bring R1a to the steppe?”

A counter intuitive suggestion I suppose. The introduction of agriculture to Europe seemed to bias the genomes of the population in favour of the migrants in terms of the Y DNA, and in favour of the indigenous people in terms of the mitochondrial DNA. Why would we expect something different in the Ukraine?

But yah, I am arguing that the surviving R1 lineage came from the group that had less ANE heritage (though not none), which I suppose isn’t all that logical.

Re: R1b in Spain – the coverage in terms of samples isn’t exactly impressive. There doesn’t seem to be evidence of ancient R1b anywhere else that I’m aware of either, so it must be „hiding” somewhere unsampled so far.

So we just haven’t been lucky enough to find ancestral R1b yet, or it was present in an area that is now inaccessible – under water or in the Sahara or something, though I think that’s unlikely.

Definitely a big mystery so far. It seems to predate IE expansion to the region at least, so while IE is probably the largest source of ANE in Europe, it may not be the only one.
January 21, 2015 at 5:12 PM

Nirjhar007 said…
@David
„There’s no evidence at the moment that Near Eastern R1a is ancestral to European R1a.”
Its more about the Iranian just wait for the aDNA from there and you will get it.

The last Underhill paper doesn’t provide such evidence, even though the authors think that it does, and many people believe them.

”The data in that paper show the presence of a rare form of R1a-M420* in the Near East, which, judging by its haplotypes, is the result of a recent founder effect in the region.”
The Basal clades are in Iran believe or not.

”We don’t know when and how that R1a-M420* ended up in the Near East, and what its origins are. But it’s not ancestral to R1a-M417, and thus to European R1a.”
But 420 is present in Iran last time i checked can you please clarify these conclusion of Underhill et al. then?
”Of the 24 R1a-M420*(xSRY10831.2) chromosomes in our data set, 18 were sampled in Iran and 3 were from eastern Turkey.”

”Similarly, five of the six observed R1a1-SRY10831.2*(xM417/Page7) chromosomes were also from Iran, with the sixth occurring in a Kabardin individual from the Caucasus. Owing to the prevalence of basal lineages and the high levels of haplogroup diversities in the region, we find a compelling case for the Middle East, possibly near present-day Iran, as the geographic origin of hg R1a.”

Anyway there is the migration from Zagros to Urals starting from 6000 bc that you can’t deny.
”As per above, I don’t really know. South Asian forages might well have been very mixed for a very long time, even perhaps in very different proportions depending on which part of South Asia they were from? Or perhaps ANE and ASI shared an ancestral branch and the split between them was never really a clean break anyway?”

ANI-ASI admixture didn’t become rapid before the 4.2 kilo year event that is my confident bet though they shared the ancestral branch.
January 21, 2015 at 8:42 PM

Davidski said…Nirjhar, R1a-M420* lineages have also been recorded in Europe in various FTDNA projects, they just weren’t reported for Europe in Underhill et al. because the authors simply didn’t manage to find them there.

Underhill et al. did nothing more than report a Near Eastern founder effect in an R1a-M420 lineage far removed on the R1a tree from European R1a. This finding has no significance whatsoever for the origins and spread of R1a. But most people have a very difficult time correctly interpreting even simple genetic data, hence these sorts of pointless debates that we’re now having.

As for the admixture dating of ANI and ASI, as I’ve already explained to you, the algorithms that date admixtures are often confused when they have to deal with ongoing mixture processes or multiple mixtures events. As a result they just report the average date, more or less.

Why don’t you e-mail the authors of Roloff and Alder and ask them how these programs work. I’m sure they will be happy to explain to you their limitations.
January 21, 2015 at 9:14 PM

Davidski said…Neolithic farmers moved into Ukraine and southern Russia about 7,000 years ago, and by 5,000 years ago they mixed with the local foragers there so that the mtDNA across this region became mostly Near Eastern and the level of ANE also dropped.

This is the same process that took place in most of Europe at the same time, except in most of Europe the ANE didn’t drop, because it wasn’t there.

We also know from other parts of Europe that for some reason male foragers were able to join the farming communities and mate with their women, so it’ll be interesting to see if the same thing happened on the steppe.

My bet is that’s how R1a survived the Neolithic transition on the steppe, and also why Yamnaya mostly showed Near Eastern mtDNA haplogroups.
January 22, 2015 at 12:07 AM

Nirjhar007 said…
@Wesolowski
”Neolithic farmers moved into Ukraine and southern Russia about 7,000 years ago, and by 5,000 years ago they mixed with the local foragers there so that the mtDNA across this region became mostly Near Eastern and the level of ANE also dropped.

This is the same process that took place in most of Europe at the same time, except in most of Europe the ANE didn’t drop, because it wasn’t there. We also know from other parts of Europe that for some reason male foragers were able to join the farming communities and mate with their women, so it’ll be interesting to see if the same thing happened on the steppe.”

Okay I understand but how we know for example the ~3000 BC population which reduced the ANE didn’t came from West Asian-Near Eastern Area itself which also had R1a?? add to that there are migration towards E Europe from Iran and West Asia before that…..
January 22, 2015 at 12:16 AM

Davidski said…
Consider the following…– the most ancient sample we know of that belonged to Y-DNA R*, ANE proxy MA-1, lived on the Mammoth steppe, which also stretched into Eastern Europe, not into the Near East.

– Neolithic farmers who populated Europe ~7,000 years ago came from the Near East and carried a grand total of 0% ANE and 0% Y-DNA R.

– the Near Eastern population that entered the steppe sometime before ~5,000 years ago (when the mixing with the local foragers was all done), lowered the level of ANE on the steppe.

– in France and Hungary male foragers were able to join farming communities and it’s thanks to them that Y-DNA I2, an European hunter-gatherer marker, is now one of the most common Y-haplogroups in Europe today.

So why should we conclude that R1a is a Near Eastern marker that arrived on the steppe during the Neolithic? Because of the so called basal clades of R1a found today in the Near East? How do we know they didn’t get there during, say, the Bronze Age?
January 22, 2015 at 12:29 AM

Davidski said…
Nirjhar, It actually took 1,000 to 2,000 years for Near Eastern farmers and European foragers to really start mixing in Western and Central Europe.

So what makes you think the Near Eastern people arrived on the steppe around 3,000 BC and mixed at once with the local foragers to create the Yamnaya culture? Don’t you think it’s more reasonable to expect that they arrived somewhere in Europe south of the Samara a couple of thousand years earlier?

Also, Armenia and northern Iran are too close to the Fertile Crescent for us to reasonably expect Y-DNA R to have been there during the Neolithic, when it wasn’t present among any of Europe’s Neolithic farmers tested to date, but suddenly showed up in Yamnaya-related Corded Ware samples from Germany from the Chalcolithic.
January 22, 2015 at 12:58 AM

Davidski said…Maju, Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the Trypillian mega-settlement somewhere around Kiev dated to at least 4,000 BC? And in fact, weren’t the Trypillians already present in Ukraine 5,000 years ago?

Again, feel free to correct me, but I’d say these people were of Near Eastern origin. They were not simply local foragers who took up farming and decided to build a few towns and temples all of a sudden.
January 22, 2015 at 1:16 AM

Maju said…
„Makes me wonder if the whole paradigm of glacial refuges is wrong, or if there was extensive movements between refugiums”.

Right now it seems hard to argue that the modern European genetics derive from such scenarios anymore, at least not in any simple way. Anyhow, the reality of the „refugia” is that they have been simplified and idealized in the genetic literature often. The main process seems rather a switch of centrality from Central Europe to SW Europe with the LGM and later to „middle” West Europe in general as conditions improved again (Magdalenian and later). There are other regions and pockets of activity but they kept low densities (notably Dniepr-Don, Italy-Dalmatia and Moravia-Hungary). There’s no such thing as a Balcanic refugium (very low densities and no unity between west and east) and there is no detectable influence on Northern Europe from anywhere but the Southwest (Magdalenian expansion, maybe with some Solutrean precursors, particularly affecting Hungary-Poland), except naturally the Northern regions of Eastern Europe, which seem rather influenced by the Dniepr-Don and Siberian areas.

Davidski said…
Maju, But we do have ancient DNA evidence that the Yamnaya nomads were a thorough mixture of Near Eastern people and Eastern European foragers already by ~5,000 years ago. More or less a 50/50 mixture in fact.

Logically this couldn’t have happened straight away, and indeed we do have evidence that farmers from the Near East entered what is now Ukraine ~7,000 years ago.

However, you seem to be arguing that there was a sudden mixture process ~5,000 years ago between Eastern European foragers and new arrivals from the Near East that produced the above mentioned 50/50 mix? If so, what’s the logic behind that?
January 22, 2015 at 2:21 AM

Davidski said…Interesting news. The Chinese have tested the ancient R1a from the Tarim Basin mummies for Z93, and they’re negative. Here’s what one of the researchers posted online…

„Our results show that Xiaohe settlers carried Hg R1a1 in paternal lineages, and Hgs H, K, C4, M* in maternal lineages. Though Hg R1a1a is found at highest frequency in both Europe and South Asia, Xiaohe R1a1a more likely originate from Europe because of it not belong to R1a1a-Z93 branch (our recently unpublished data) which mainly found in Asians.”

Krefter said…Maju, „very interesting indeed. It tells us two things: (1) that Xiahoe (and by extension at least part of the Afanesevo people, surely at the origin of historical Tocharians) were probably of European origin and (2) that their lineages did not manage to leave a durable legacy in Central Asia (nor anywhere else in Asia).”

The Z93-negative thing is a surprise, but doesn’t defute Z93’s connection to Yamna. When were speaking of R1a from 4,000 years ago, we can’t call one European and one Asian, because the main R1a branches of Asia and Europe had just recently separated.

I’m not sure where you’re going with that statement, but there’s a load of other evidence in ancient DNA that Z93 is a Yamna-derived lineage.

Z93 was found in a western/eastern admixed population in bronze age Mongolia, along with Yamna-type mtDNA.

There’s no explaining away historical Indo Iranian speakers and their cultural ancestors living deep in Asia having a Z93-associated STR haplotype and Yamna-type mtDNA.
January 22, 2015 at 2:00 PM

Davidski said…Nirjhar, Read the whole comment by Hui Zhou. He says the new data suggests that the Tarim Basin mummies came from the Afanasevo culture, which came from Europe.
January 22, 2015 at 7:51 PM

Davidski said…Err…no, I think PIE had a lot more than 10-15% WHG. It’s a long way from the western steppe to India, and languages can be learned. But I think R1a survived the journey because the early Indo-Europeans were highly patriarchal and patrilineal.
January 22, 2015 at 7:55 PM

New map of Yamna admixture (Eurogenes Steppe K10)

Maciamo 18-10-16, 15:58
I finally found some time to make the map of Yamna admixture using the data from Eurogenes Steppe K10. There was no data for some countries, so I had to guess based on neighbouring countries or isolated samples reported on forums. That is the case for Portugal, Ireland, Wales, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Slovakia and Azerbaijan.

I would especially need regional samples from all over Iberia. There are huge variations from nearly 0% of Yamna among some Basques to 16% in some Spaniards (but their region of origin is unknown). The Eurogenes data just shows a lower percentage in northern Spain, but that is not very helpful as Galicia, Cantabria and Catalonia probably have very different levels.

Regional data from Britain, France and Germany are also welcome.

Even though Yamna chieftains from kurgan belonged almost exclusively to R1b, among modern Europeans it is the Uralic, Baltic, Slavic, Germanic and North Caucasian people who inherited the highest share of Yamna ancestry, not Western Europeans, who now have the highest percentage of haplogroup R1b. One of the reasons for this is that R1b arrived in Western Europe after over a thousand years of genetic dilution through intermarriages with Balkanic and Central European people. In contrast, in the eastern half of Europe, R1b lost its position of dominance and was replaced by R1a and N1c lineages, starting from the Catacomb culture in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, and continuing until the Middle Ages. Nevertheless Yamna ancestry was passed maternally in the Steppe and in neighbouring populations, which explains the high Yamna admixture from the Baltic to the North Caucasus.

Maciamo19-10-16, 08:55
I disagree, imo it makes more sense that Basques got their ~80+ of R1b from 25% of their ancestry than just 0-5% of it. So much founder effect is just ridiculous. Not even in India is the aDNA of the R1a bearers so low.

No it doesn’t make sense because the Basque R1b-M153 is only 2800 years old and has a TMRCA of 2500 years. Most Basques belong to the subclade just under that, with a TMRCA of 2100 years. This means that the Basque R1b is a very recent phenomenon starting in Roman times. But who knows, R1b might have continued to expand little by little each generations among the Basques for over 1000 years before reaching today’s frequencies. I now believe that the Basque only got their R1b very gradually over the last 2500 years and that it has nothing to do with Bronze Age PIE invasions. That has the benefit to explain why they kept speaking Basque. I don’t know why R1b increased gradually. Maybe increased fertility compared to the native male lineages (I2-M26 + G2a ?), or a noble lineage of some sort. It was probably a combination of factors. Anywau, if R1b entered the Basque gene pool from, say, neighbouring Aquitaine or Castille c. 500 BCE or even 100 BCE, it could have been autosomally low in Yamna ancestry (say 15-20%). After diluting it slowly over 1000 to 2000 more years with relatively pure Basque women, there would be very little Yamna left, surely under 5%. If Haak et al. are right and the Basque have 27% of Yamna, then it becomes much harder to explain with such a young TMRCA for their R1b, especially that Haak found 5% less Yamna among other Spaniards (22%). Spanish branches of DF27 are between 3500 and 4400 years old, so Late Bronze Age, and match the arrival of foreign Bronze Age cultures like El Argar. So there is no doubt that R1b was in many parts of Spain long before it spread among the Basques.

It’s good that you mention India. Indian Brahmins have at most 15-20% of Steppe DNA. In fact, since they descend from Sintashta rather than Yamna, their Steppe DNA should be higher in EHG than CHG. Using Dodecad K12, they have about 18% of East European + West European + Mediterranean, but the latter also includes non-IE Neolithic ancestry. Using K12b, they have only 5% of Atlantic_Med + North European, but that doesn’t include the Gedrosian that came with the IE. So depending on the calculator, we get somewhere between 7 and 18% of Steppe admixture. Unfortunately neither the Haak paper nor the Steppe K10 data have any Indian sample. But the Indo-Aryans invaded India from 1800 BCE, almost exactly at the same time as IE invaded Iberia with El Argar. And we get a similar percentage of Steppe admixture (10-20%) both in Spaniards and upper-caste Indians. But it took another 1500 years before R1b-M153 started spreading among the Basques, so a considerably lower Steppe admixture is to be expected.

MarkoZ 19-10-16, 10:42
People with Baltic Hunter Gatherer genomes said they’re WHG. Before that I thought they’d be EHG admixed as well. The error lies in assuming that the Baltic populations are the result of a simple coalescence of Neolithic Corded Ware and Mesolithic elements. We already know that North-Eastern Europe received substantial input from further east by way of Russia, since N1c is the dominant paternal marker in all North-Eastern populations barring Belarusians. The preponderance of this marker transcends linguistic and national affiliation.

Olympus Mons
19-10-16, 11:53
Finally! 🙂 I’ve been saying this since Haak et al came out, but so far no one has seen that possibility. I said then that maybe the title of the paper „Massive Migration from the steppe”, was incorrect.

If there was a large reservoir of SHG (which was an admixture, supposedly, of WHG and the EHG) in the north, or maybe other groups we haven’t yet sampled, or EHG further west elsewhere, wouldn’t that inflate the „Yamnaya” percentages beyond what actual Yamnaya people brought who moved there?

YES. What I don’t get it is why every time I raise those options I get immediately eviscerated by ten guys (especially at eurogenes!).

Maybe you Angela can enlighten me a little bit.

If Karelia was EHG (and already R1a). If there is SHG which is a mix of EHG and WHG, if apparently there is even EHG and SHG in the Balkans 7000bc… why in hell people insistently talk about a bunch of guys that show up near the freaking urals, as a uber event in Europes ancestry?

Also how do we know that CWC = massive Yamnya migration (sort of) if the region where they thrived might have been loaded up with EHG and even guys that were R1a?

Tomenable 19-10-16, 14:04
so how do we know that CWC = massive Yamnya migration (sort of) if the region where they thrived might have been loaded up with EHG and even guys that were R1a?

Kunda and Narva cultures = no any R1a and no any EHG, 100% WHG and their Y-DNA was haplogroup I. Today areas formerly occupied by Kunda and Narva cultures are dominated by R1a and N1c haplogroups.

Goga 19-10-16, 18:48But the map I made was only for the ‚Steppe’ component, Then you should rename it into the ‚map of Steppe admixture’. Since it doesn’t correspondent well with the ‚Yamnaya admixture’. At this moment your map is MISLEADING and full of contradictions. Like now according to your map there is more Yamnaya admixture in Finno-Ugric/Saami people than European Indo-Europeans. Like you said Yamnaya Admixture is more than Steppe Admixture.

Steppe admixture in NorthEastern Europe existed even before the arrival of late second stage Yamnaya PIE. So, a lot Steppe ancestry in NorthEastern Europe has nothing to do with second stage Proto-Indo-European speakers from Yamnaya.

Yamnaya = Steppe + NorthWest Asia.

So, you should rename your map into ‚map of Steppe admixture’ or change your percentages about the Yamnaya ancestry.

Goga19-10-16, 19:04I knew N1c couldn’t be a Baltic hunter gatherer. N1c, Siberian admixture, and Uralic languages in Northeast Europe all probably have the same post-CWC source. Then again its arrival might be different for different regions.I started to think that to, before I realized that this map is WRONG on many levels. After seeing his map I started to believe that Saami have more Corded Ware admixture than Norwegians, lol. But I was mislead by a wrong map. It was stupid of me, not to make additional examination of data.

So, hold on a minute. The map of Maciamo doesn’t hold any ground and is at least misleading. I don’t think Maciamo tried to mislead us on purpose. He is still making mistakes by using sources from people with hidden twisted agenda.

His map is not about Yamnaya but the Steppes. And there IS a correlation between the Steppes admixture AND Y-DNA hg. like N1c1 & Q.

Goga19-10-16, 19:14
Absolutely crazy, no way to deal with it, if I have understood well Gedrosia was the actual Chalco_Iran component… but it is near to absent in the steppe.

Very simple. Modern European Steppe folks (like Russians) have NOTHING to do with the ancient Iranic Central Asian Steppe folks. Only the ancient Indo-Iranized Steppes folks were full of Gedrosia. While modern Eastern Europeans don’t have that admixture, sicne Eastern Europeans have nothing in common with the ancient Indo-Iranized Steppes folks. The only common thing between ancient Indo-Iranized tribes and modern day Eastern Europeans is the Steppes admixture.

Those ancient Indo-Iranized Steppes folks are now Turkified and speak Turkic language as their native language and do consider themselves as Turks/Tatars.

With other words. Eastern Europeans (Balto-Slavs) are NOT directly related to Indo-Iranized cultures in the Steppes. And those ancient Indo-Iranized folks of the Steppes are now native Turkic/Tatar people of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan.

Those Shintashta/Androno Steppes folks who were once Indo-IRANIZED by people (Aryans) from the Iranian Plateau were later Turkified and those Indo-Iranized Steppe cultures became Tatars/Turks.

Kristiina20-10-16, 14:53
Proto-Uralic is dated ~ 2000 BCE Jaakko Häkkinen who has given the most recent dating for different protolanguage levels based on linguistic criteria does not propose that Proto-Uralic is dated 2000 BCE.

In his model pre-Proto-Uralic and Proto-Uralic is dated between 3500 and 2800. The late Proto-Uralic is dated 2300 BC. However, the early history is quite blurred and the time margins are wide, but, by 2000 BC, Proto-Uralic had probably already disintegrated.

Background
The Tarim Basin, located on the ancient Silk Road, played a very important role in the history of human migration and cultural communications between the West and the East. However, both the exact period at which the relevant events occurred and the origins of the people in the area remain very obscure. In this paper, we present data from the analyses of both Y chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) derived from human remains excavated from the Xiaohe cemetery, the oldest archeological site with human remains discovered in the Tarim Basin thus far.

Results
Mitochondrial DNA analysis showed that the Xiaohe people carried both the East Eurasian haplogroup (C) and the West Eurasian haplogroups (H and K), whereas Y chromosomal DNA analysis revealed only the West Eurasian haplogroup R1a1a in the male individuals.

Conclusion
Our results demonstrated that the Xiaohe people were an admixture from populations originating from both the West and the East, implying that the Tarim Basin had been occupied by an admixed population since the early Bronze Age. To our knowledge, this is the earliest genetic evidence of an admixed population settled in the Tarim Basin. (…)

Croatian genetic heritage: Y-chromosome story

Abstract
The aim of this article is to offer a concise interpretation of the scientific data about the topic of Croatian genetic heritage that was obtained over the past 10 years. We made a short overview of previously published articles by our and other groups, based mostly on Y-chromosome results. The data demonstrate that Croatian human population, as almost any other European population, represents remarkable genetic mixture. More than 3/4 of the contemporary Croatian men are most probably the offspring of Old Europeans who came here before and after the Last Glacial Maximum. The rest of the population is the offspring of the people who were arriving in this part of Europe through the southeastern route in the last 10,000 years, mostly during the neolithization process. We believe that the latest discoveries made with the techniques for whole-genome typing using the array technology, will help us understand the structure of Croatian population in more detail, as well as the aspects of its demographic history.